CSSEdit & TextMate = L-O-V-E

Posted on 2007 Nov 17
2 mins read

This post should be treated as an historical artifact.
It probably contain broken external links and it may no
longer reflect my views or opinions.

I don’t know if I’ve ever personally mentioned this and I know I’m years late to the party, but it bears repeating that CSSEdit and TextMate are two of the only appli­ca­tions I miss when I’m on a Linux machine. One could argue that there is always (re: eter­nally) going to be vi/vim or emacs, but in my opinion there is no beating the combi­nation of these two appli­ca­tions for web devel­opment or layout work.

CSSEdit has the most powerful and well thought-out interface I’ve ever seen for working with stylesheet prop­erties, and its source-and-visual CSS editor is right­fully award-winning. If you’ve got to spend more than an hour a week in stylesheets, CSSEdit is the only reasonable tool for the job.

If you’re more of a code­monkey, TextMate is the darling of both the Unix refugee camp that took shelter in OS X recently, as well as the Ruby and Rails devel­opment commu­nities. It’s sort of the best damned text-and-code editor ever produced for the MacOS, with the possible exception of the long-time heavy­weight, BBEdit. The bundles are well struc­tured, and support almost any language or variant you can think of.

If you’re in the market for power editors, you could do worse than giving these two a spin. Of course, if you’re the “all in one” sort, there is always Coda, by the boys at Panic. While it was slightly raw the last time I used it, if I hadn’t already owned a license for TextMate and CSSEdit when it came out I’d have probably purchased it. It’s improved consid­erably, and it is under steady devel­opment, but it is extremely web-centric (see the supported languages) and that might be a drawback for some people.